Platfora Raises $38 Million to Help Enterprises Win in the Fact-Based Economy

Platfora, the Big Data Analytics software company that aims to eradicate the gut decision, today announced a $38 million investment led by Tenaya Capital, which brings the company’s total financing to $65 million. Also participating in this round are Citi Ventures, Cisco and Allegis Capital, as well as prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and In-Q-Tel.

The company will use the funds to invest aggressively in talent, technology and field organizations to enable Platfora to lead organizations in a once-in-a-generation shift away from SQL-based business intelligence technology into the current era of Big Data Analytics.

“The widespread adoption of big data infrastructure by mainstream enterprises presents a tremendous opportunity for analytics vendors. We believe Platfora’s unique intellectual property and its ability to help any company unlock new business opportunities from their data assets will resonate in the market,” said Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital.

For big data to be valuable now and in the future, organizations must add a purpose-built analytics platform on top of Hadoop that can scale exponentially and handle all forms of big data: customer interaction, transaction and machine data. Platfora created the first Big Data Analytics platform that puts these types of data at the fingertips of line-of-business users. Now non-technical users can interactively manipulate data to make fact-based decisions without the intervention of IT, gaining never-before-possible competitive advantage from their big data.

“Enterprises are awash in data but are struggling to gain useful insights. While intuition is critical in business, business executives readily admit that they are still making too many gut decisions because they cannot adequately access or analyze all of their data to make better informed decisions. They cannot access or interpret these new large and heterogeneous big data sets fast enough,” said Ben Werther, CEO at Platfora. “With our big data analytics platform, we’re helping organizations participate and win in the Fact-based Economy which we estimate will unlock $5 trillion in new value in the next 10 years through novel uses of big data.”

“Big Data and the Internet of Everything are driving major IT disruptions today. But for organizations to take advantage of these shifts, they need scalable analytics platforms,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president of Corporate Business Development at Cisco. “Platfora’s analytics layer not only makes legacy and Hadoop infrastructure instantly more valuable, but helps non-technical business professionals access the data they need to innovate.”

“We have been engaged with Platfora for over 18 months and are excited to participate in this round of funding,” said Ramneek Gupta, Managing Director at Citi Ventures. “We are particularly impressed by their interactive, real-time analytics capabilities on data at scale in Hadoop.”

“With Platfora’s Big Data Analytics platform, Vivint is able to combine different types of data and analyze the information in new ways. These new insights allow us to make constant improvements to our suite of home automation products. Platfora’s easy-to-use yet powerful platform has helped Vivint maintain its position as the leader in the home automation market and enables our company to better execute our mission of bringing simple, affordable home automation technology to the masses,” said Brandon Bunker, Senior Director of Customer Analytics and Intelligence at Vivint.

“For business analysts, the promise of Big Data Analytics can be very seductive. However, they are often hampered by a plethora of immature, emerging technologies that often require significant IT or programming skills,” said Dr. Barry Devlin, founder of 9sight Consulting. “The Holy Grail for Big Data Analytics is to provide information workers with direct data access and analytical capabilities at their desktops, through an integrated environment powerful enough to understand, manipulate, and analyze any data source no matter its age or structure. When line-of-business workers are given this capability and trained to use it wisely, companies experience a quickening effect—offering potential competitive advantages once unattainable or even unimaginable.”

About Platfora
Platfora puts an end to the gut decision by giving enterprises blazing fast factual insights across all of their data sets for outsized competitive advantage. Delivered as subscription software on premises or in the cloud, Platfora Big Data Analytics is a platform that anyone can use. Existing tools and processes for analyzing data force line-of-business executives to make gut decisions instead of fact-based decisions because they can’t get to all the facts or get to them fast enough—too much and too many varieties of data are accumulating too quickly. Yet, businesses are at risk of irrelevance or extinction if they continue to do not enough, or nothing, with big data. Platfora’s technology mixes customer interaction, machine and transactional data for infinite correlations across an infinite amount of data so that enterprises can meet and exceed their business goals in the Fact-based Economy. Customers such as Citi, Comcast, DirecTV, Disney, Edmunds.com, Opower, Riot Games, Vivint and The Washington Post use Platfora as their permanent path to success with big data. www.platfora.com